The Idler

A Country Diary 81

Problems with Wood

OVER THE LAST two months, we have been mainly concerned with keeping warm. Now that we have two wood-burning stoves, writes Tom Hodgkinson, the amount of work for me in wood-chopping and preparation has nearly doubled.

The major problem has been the wood supply. The wood I bought this time last year had all run out. We had in the wood barn the load we’d bought in the summer, and another load I bought in December. Neither really burned well. I have spent hours kneeling in front of the fires and blowing on them to keep them stoked up. The wood is simply not seasoned enough. I am learning that hard woods like oak need at least a year and preferably two to dry out properly. Chop a log open and you can see the damp wood inside.

What is going on here is that the tree is full of water, which it needs to live. When it is felled, the water stays inside the wood, and only gradually dries up. If you try to burn logs which are not well seasoned, they will burn extremely slowly, and will not produce much heat. The problem is that log merchants rarely if ever deliver well seasoned wood, leading to much cursing of them all round, as the men of the household sit forlornly puffing on a weak fire. Some of our fires at home have been so hopeless that they seemed to be emanating cold rather than warmth.

This general low quality of the wood from your average log merchant means that you would need to order the wood one year in advance to be sure of its being in good burnable condition for your fire. That’s the kind of foresight I find it difficult to achieve. It’s true that the odd unseasoned log is all right: if put on a very hot fire, it will slow things down a little. Certainly, wood that is too dry is sometimes frowned upon, because it burns so quickly.

The test of how seasoned the wood is is its weight. Very heavy logs are full of water and should be left for a year or two. Very light logs will burn too fast: we had a wonderful load of four-year seasoned wood as a gift from my friend Howard. It burned beautifully and was very easy to light, but we absolutely roared through it.

One tip is to keep a bucket of coal by the fire and throw in the odd handful, and then place a couple of logs over the top.The coal will pump out a good heat and will burn the logs slowly. This then gets good value out of your wood.

There are some woods that can be burned “green”, ie as soon as they are cut down. Ash is one of these. I took advantage of this fact and sawed off an ash branch form one of the hedgerows. I borrowed my neighbour’s chainsaw and then chopped each log with the axe. It was a huge amount of work. The ash burned beautifully, but the whole branch probably lasted two days, if that. And had taken me about two hours to process.

So there is a huge amount of thought, work and foresight required in keeping up a good supply of firewood. Yet again I failed in this. My logs, I reckon, will not be ready until September. This means that I had to undergo the humiliation of buying those orange nets from the nursery, the clear sign that you’ve messed up. It has to be said, though, that the logs in the nets are absolute perfection: they light easily, burn well, pump out a lot of heat but are not too light.

When I complained about the cost, the nurseryman pointed out that a lot of work has gone into these logs. Certainly they produce the most fantastic fires, and are easy to light. I wonder though if I should really do more work myself? Should I be going into the woods and dragging fallen branches home to chainsaw up and then split? I do sometimes stop the car and pop a fallen branch into the back. Or drag home ash poles which have been left in the lanes by the hedge-cutting machine. But it always seems to be such a tiny amount. Certainly I thank my lucky stars that I didn’t spend two thousand pounds on a new wood-burning Rayburn, an idea I seriously considered last year. I think I would have been carrying, chopping, splitting, storing and stacking all day.

My friend Fred has given me a load: it’s a mix of poplar and hazlenut.It needs to be chainsawed and split, and again will not be ready till September. But September is also the time when the National Trust sell logs.Now that really is the answer: looking back, I see that when I had ordered their logs, we had no problem with the fires at all. The wood was perfectly seasoned. But I forgot last September, and instead ordered a cheap but wet load from the local Christian retreat centre, which owns a lot of woodland. Hence my current problem.

Another tip I’ve heard is to find a source of pallets. This is seasoned softwood and is very good and starting up a goodly blaze, onto which you can drop your less well-seasoned logs. But again there is toil involved: you need to break them up with an iron bar and then saw them.

Another mistake I made was to try to start my fires with twigs picked up from outside at the time. These twigs themselves seemed to be wet, and it would take two or three attempts to get the fire going. I was given the tip to bring a load of twigs in and leave them for two days on the Rayburn. Or best of all, buy a small kindling axe and chop your own. I brought our kindling axe to the front porch and I now chop it up there, to save having to walk to the wood barn. I am ambivalent about firelighters.They seem to me to be a cheat.I would prefer to use newspapers and candle stubs to get the fire going. On the other, they can be a real help, so why force yourself to suffer?

The other option I suppose would be to live in one room with one fire, as was the case in the olden days. The fire was used to cook and to give warmth. The idea of having three fires going all day, which is effectively what we are doing, would have seemed absurdly luxurious and labour-intensive to the ordinary folk, without a team of servants to keep the fires ablaze and the dry wood coming in.

In January, we decorated my study, which put out of action both the study and the sitting room. The result was that we all sat in the kitchen, warmed by the oil-fired Rayburn. No fires to keep up! Wonderful. As two locals said to me at a party the other day: “we’re country people. We like oil!”